Ceci n’est pas une pipe

S. I. Hayakawa, author of Language in Thought and Action, gives language a new meaning overall. Aristotle was a Greek philosopher who believed that, “all our thoughts and ideas have come into our conscience through what we have heard and seen” (Gaarder 108). This statement is similar to the point that Hayakawa was trying to make in his book. He taught that the symbol is not necessarily the word itself (Hayakawa). So then how do you explain a “word”?

Aristotle, like Hayakawa, explained a word by referring to the “idea” of it (Gaarder 107). For example, if Aristotle was trying to explain a horse, he referred to it as the idea of a horse. Hayakawa repeatedly explained that the word is not the thing, and the map is not the territory it stands for (Hayakawa 29). A map may have a similar structure to the structure of the territory but it doesn’t mean that the map is the territory. The concept of the symbol not being the word can be shown in the Belgian artist René Magritte’s painting, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe), even though his painting is of a pipe.

 

Aristotle, along with believing that all ideas come from what we have heard and seen, thought that we have an innate power of reason, which is the ability to reason that you were born with. Hayakawa said that human beings have let various noises stand for specific words (Hayakawa 26). For example, if we saw a certain object, we may say “that is a book”. However, it is not actually a book but rather a picture of a book. In Sophie’s world, Hilde is reading from a book called “Sophie’s World” but her “Sophie’s World” is simply an idea, whereas the book we read is an actual book…or is it.

Works Cited

Gaarder, Jostein. Sophie's World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. Print.

Hayakawa, S. I. Language in Thought and Action. 2d ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964. Print.